This album of 76 sepia photographs from the Library of Congress not only illuminates every attitude and expression of childhood, it also proves that children themselves have changed very little in the past 160 years. A small girl in 1921 Italy tries to make sense of a Houston newspaper; a little fellow in a white suit looks dubious as his father combs his hair before a parade in 1942 California; and four Nubian boys from 1901 Egypt paddle out on logs to shoot the rapids of the Nile. Here too are children caught up in the history of the adult world, from young Richard Derby and Kermit Roosevelt Jr., seen in a 1916 pose with Teddy Roosevelt, to a dozen English schoolchildren huddling in a trench during a German air raid. Annotated by Pulitzer Prize–winning child psychiatrist Robert Coles, these images are as much works of art as they are documents, by such photographers as A. Aubrey Bodine, Edward S. Curtis, Dorothea Lange, Jack Delano, Toni Frissell, Russell Lee, and Lewis Wickes Hine.